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Mario Antonioletti's blog

One of the benefits of teaching a Carpentry course is that it can increase or deepen your understanding of a subject. A recent instance for me was in using OpenRefine, a tool that runs locally on your machine (you do not have to export your data to a third party service).

• Create a new dataset. It does not modify your original data and keeps provenance of all the steps. Depending on the capabilities of your local machine it can deal with data sets that are up to about 100k rows.

Watch the videos on the OpenRefine website for a good overview. If you want to know more, follow the Carpentry OpenRefine for Ecologists lesson. In this example, I am going to show how easy is to generate a new dataset from the EPCC website. Follow along after you have installed OpenRefine on your system.

The Software Sustainability Institute's (SSI) Collaborations Workshop 2019 (CW19) will be held at the West Park Teaching Hub, Loughborough University, Loughborough from 1-3 April 2019. This year the workshop will be themed around topics based on interoperability, documentation, training, and sustainability. Keynote speakers will include Catherine Stihler, CEO of Open Knowledge International, and Franziska Heine (link points to a German article), Head of Software & Development at Wikimedia Deutschland. They will open the event on 1st April.

For the fourth year running, from Wednesday 13th March to Saturday 16th of March, EPCC will be attending the Big Bang Fair (BBF) at the NEC in Birmigham to demonstrate the wonders of supercomputing. The BBF encourages young people to adopt STEM-based subjects at school and later as a career – not only through universities but also apprenticeships and other career choices. This is also a great opportunity for our colleagues to undertake some outreach.

During a Software Carpentry course you, as an instructor, stand in front of a class typing your lesson content, eg bash or git, and the students type what you type into their own shell.

Depending on the layout of the room, you need to make the font on your terminal large enough for all students to see it, which can be somewhat disorientating as an instructor. Moreover if the layout of the room is not ideal, eg some students are facing away from the screen, they will have to constantly turn to see the screen, which can be a pain for them. But I recently found a Python app that changes all that.

While a team of EPCCers were doing outreach in London at New Scientist Live (NSLive) for a second year running, another group of us attended Bang Goes the Borders (BGTB) at St Mary's Primary School in Melrose, which is mostly attended by children aged from 5-12 with their parents. For us this is a relatively local event and this is the eighth year that we been there. It is only a day event but a pretty busy one.

From 1987 until 2001 EPCC ran a Summer Scholarship Programme (SSP), which provided funding for undergraduate students from all over the world to come to EPCC for a ten-week period. General high performance computing (HPC) training was provided during the first week with the remaining nine weeks spent on an HPC-related project and writing a summary project of what was achieved. There was great competition for places, resulting in an extremely high standard of students taking part. This summer the 1998 SSP contingent decided to reunite, 20 years after they first came to Edinburgh as SSPers.

For the third year running a group of us from EPCC attended the Big Bang Fair (BBF) at the NEC in Birmingham through the ARCHER Outreach programme. BBF provides an excellent opportunity to show a wide range of young people what supercomputing is about and encourage them to adopt careers in STEM-based subjects.

We are writing our activities up to encourage others to try doing supercomputing outreach and show that you do not need fancy equipment. For more information see the ARCHER's Ambassador pack or GitHub where we develop these. We enourage you to feedback or collaborate with us.

I recently looked into whether the Python package PyQt5 could be installed on Cirrus, a Tier-2 national service, on behalf of one of our HPC Europa visitors. The Cirrus documentation recommends that you do this using virtual environments and provides a helpful example. However, the problem is that if you subsequently use pip or easy_install to install additional Python packages within the virtual environment you will get a permission denied as it tries to install the package centrally to directories you do not have access rights to. I eventually managed to find a solution.